Deliverance is a 1972 American thriller film directed and produced by John Boorman from a screenplay by James Dickey, who adapted it from his own 1970 novel.
It follows four businessmen from Atlanta who venture into the remote northern Georgia wilderness to see the Cahulawassee River before it is dammed, only to find themselves in danger from the area's inhabitants and nature.
It stars Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox, with the latter two making their feature film debuts.
In 2008, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
[1][2] Lewis Medlock, Ed Gentry, Bobby Trippe, and Drew Ballinger are Atlanta businessmen who decide to canoe down the Cahulawassee River in the remote northern Georgia wilderness before it is dammed.
Ed and Bobby encounter a pair of mountain men emerging from the woods, one carrying a shotgun and missing his two front teeth.
Following an argument, Bobby is forced by the men to undress and the unarmed man rapes him, demanding he "squeal like a pig", while Ed is tied to a tree and held at gunpoint.
Lewis sneaks up and kills the rapist with his bow and arrow while Ed snatches the shotgun from the other mountain man, who flees into the woods.
The three carefully concoct a cover story for local authorities about Drew's death, lying about their adventure to Sheriff Bullard in order to escape a possible double murder charge.
Sheriff Bullard does not believe the men and reveals that Deputy Queen is suspicious of them because his brother-in-law went hunting a few days ago and has not returned.
This site has since been flooded and lies 130 feet (40 m) under the surface of Lake Jocassee, on the border between Oconee and Pickens counties in South Carolina.
[7] The film is infamous for the cost cutting by the studio in an effort to kill it[8] and having the actors perform their own stunts, such as Jon Voight notably climbing the cliff himself.
[10] Reynolds recalled his shoulder and head hitting rocks and floating downstream with all of his clothes torn off, then waking up with director Boorman at his bedside.
[11] Regarding the courage of the four main actors in the movie performing their own stunts without insurance protection, Dickey was quoted as saying all of them "had more guts than a burglar".
As Boorman did not want to do that, he decided that the phrase "squeal like a pig", suggested by Rabun County liaison Frank Rickman, was a good replacement for the original dialogue in the script.
Boorman was given a gold record for the "Dueling Banjos" hit single; this was later stolen from his house by the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill.
The site's consensus states: "Given primal verve by John Boorman's unflinching direction and Burt Reynolds' star-making performance, Deliverance is a terrifying adventure.
"[27] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 80 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
"[29] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "an engrossing adventure, a demonstrable labor of love" carried by Voight and Reynolds.
[30] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film was "certainly a distinctive and gripping piece of work, with a deliberately brooding, ominous tone and visual style that put you in a grave, fearful frame of mind, almost in spite of yourself.
However, Ebert also wrote Deliverance "totally fails [in] its attempt to make some kind of significant statement about its action [...] It's possible to consider civilized men in a confrontation with the wilderness without throwing in rapes, cowboy-and-Indian stunts and pure exploitative sensationalism.
"[33] Vincent Canby of The New York Times was also generally negative, calling the film "a disappointment" because "so many of Dickey's lumpy narrative ideas remain in his screenplay that John Boorman's screen version becomes a lot less interesting than it has any right to be.